This push is basically bullshit. Finland does not start kids at school until age 7 and they have famously good results. Let me quote just a small excerpt from someone who has surveyed the evidence on the question:

"University studies are often quoted to support the perceived academic beneﬁts of preschool. What is not often mentioned is that whilst these studies demonstrate preschool in a favourable light when compared with an impoverished home environment; preschool environments and results do not compare favourably with the average home environment.
Even Professor Edward Zigler, credited as “the father of Head Start” a well-respected American preschool program admits “there is a large body of evidence that there is little to be gained by exposing middle class children to early education…(and) evidence that indicates early schooling is inappropriate for many four-year-olds, and that it may be harmful to their development.”So what about the long-term academic effects of preschool? The longitudinal studies, often quoted to argue an academic advantage provided by preschool for lower socio-economic groups, actually also show that this “advantage” disappears by grade three.If preschool were truly beneﬁcial in terms of giving children a head start, those places with some form of compulsory preschool should do demonstrably better academically. The evidence does not bear this out. The two states of America which have compulsory preschool, Georgia and Oklahoma, have the lowest results for fourth grade reading tests in the country."

So why the deception? The push is in fact just a push for free child-minding

Children should start school at the age of three to give them the best start in life and to stop Australia falling behind Europe and China, leading experts claim.

Lobby groups are urging the Federal Government to boost funding for more children to have access to school earlier.

More and more private schools and early learning centres are offering 'pre-kindy' which exposes children to play-based learning so they are better prepared for when they start school.

Many programs have lengthy waiting lists and now an initiative led by the Early Learning Benefits campaign wants extra funding so more children have access to pre-school education.

'We have some children already having access to high quality learning, but many are missing out … equity is a big issue,' Early Childhood Australia CEO Samantha Page told The Courier Mail.

Latest statistics show only 58.5 per cent of three-year-olds in Australia are enrolled in pre-school programs, compared to 95-100 per cent of children in France, Denmark, Norway, Israel and Spain.

University of the Sunshine Coast senior lecturer Dr Ali Black, said international research showed children introduced to high quality education earlier were more likely to go to university, gain better jobs and even own their own homes.

They were more resilient, had better social skills and had fewer behavioural issues.

Australian Catholic University early childhood specialist, Laurien Beane, said the push would follow the lead of cutting-edge Scandanavian countries, who have invested huge resources to educating kids from birth to the age of five.

'We invest in the 5-18 age group and it starts too late … that's why as a nation we are languishing so far behind a number of other countries,' Ms Beane said.

Ms Beane said the main objectivity of early education was not about literacy and numeracy but to foster curiosity, creativity, imagination and social development. Children would typically attend two days a week for five-and-a-half hours.

They would have lessons in music, literature, languages, as well as more social-based lessons about respecting others and regulating emotions.

Ms Page said Labor made a commitment in October to extend funding to early education for three-year-olds by 2021.

Some parents say they feel pressured to be in favour of the push as primary schools are likely to give preference to children attending pre-kindergarten programs. Other fears include schools will favour children in those programs to boost rankings and funding.

Childcare and early learning provider C&K is among those leading the way with pre-kindergarten rooms, like Banyo in Brisbane's north.

Brenton Tarrant displays a mix of ideas in his manifesto, though, as we shall see, it is a rather familiar mix. His overriding idea is a dislike of Islam in general and Jihadis in particular. His massacre was a clear answer to the Jihadis. He says: If the Jihadis can slaughter Western men women and children indiscriminately, I am justified in slaughtering Muslim men women and children indiscriminately. It is Old Testament justice.

And it is that hostility to Islam that the Left identify as "right wing". And conservatives do indeed voice strong reservations about Islam. But conservatives are not alone in that. There can surely be few people in the Western world who are happy about the constant assaults on Western people by Jihadis.

The only people who seem to like the Jihadis are the Left. They do their best to protect Muslims from any retribution or any check at all. But their reason for that is clear. The Leftist's whole aim in life is to disrupt the existing society (to "fundamentally transform" it, in the words of Barack Obama and Bernard Sanders). So the disruptions caused by Muslims makes Muslims "fellow travellers" to the Left who must not be denounced.

So his dislike of Islam does identity Tarrant as non-Left in that regard but that does not make him conservative. His dislike is simply an extreme version of a normal reaction.

So what of his other views? What of his admiration of Communist China and Bernard Sanders? What of his describing himself as both a Fascist and an eco-fascist? What about his belief in global warming and other Greenie themes? Except for his ideas about Muslims he would make a pretty good Greenie and a pretty good socialist.

And liking both China and Fascism are not at all inconsistent. Although China is still ruled by the Communist Party, the Dengist reforms have given it a classical Fascist economy. Business is allowed to get on with business but the State keeps a watchful eye overall.

What makes his hostility to Islam particularly strong is his racial awareness. He sees himself as part of the white race and deplores attacks on it. So how common is that? Mention of race has been so thoroughly suppressed in our society that there could well be a large reservoir of racial sentiment just below the surface. We don't know -- though Leftists regularly assert it.

There is no doubt, however, that seeing himself as part of an identity group -- whites -- was the key to Tarrant's behaviour. And the chief promoters of whites as an identity group are of course the Left. The Left are entranced by group identities and the big gorilla looming above all other groups is white males. Only a few extreme-Left whites take any notice of that but there was one white male who did -- Brenton Tarrant. There had to be one. He had been exposed to a lot of Leftist thought and suddenly it occurred to him when hearing talk about whites: "Hey! That's me!"

And according to the Left, whites are all powerful masters of the universe who control everyone else. And Tarrant liked that identity. So identify he did. And when he saw that there was an evil force -- Islam -- trying to tear down white civilization, he took up arms in its defence, as group members tend to do. And it is not pychopathic to take up arms in defence of your group. "Greater love hath no man ..." Tarrant was sucked in by Leftist identity talk and it all developed from there. Had he been a conservative, he would have rejected identity talk in favour of the centrality of the individual.

But where have we heard all that before? Where have we previously encountered a combination of socialism, environmentalism and racial loyalty? Yes. It was our evil twins, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Both were good socialists, good Greenies and strong racial loyalists. In short, Tarrant has reinvented historical Nazism in his own mind. He is a perfectly consistent Nazi in the historical sense of that term. And, like the Nazis of history, Tarrant attacked those he saw as his racial enenmies.

But he is NOT "Right wing" any more than Nazism ("National Socialism") was. Far from it. And his ideas are not "mixed up". They once dominated two of the biggest and most sophisticated nations in Europe, so they have their own consistency.

And it follows fairly strongly from that that Tarrant is not a psychopath/sociopath. I can see no evidence that Tarrant was a sociopath. I have done research into psychopathy/sociopathy and have a couple of articles on it in the academic journal so I know a bit about it but nothing stands out to me in Tarrant's manifesto that points clearly in that direction. Narcissism, yes. Psychopathy, No. He in fact displays a sense of humor fairly often, which is rare among psychopaths.

So Tarrant is not mad and belongs firmly on the Green/Left

Footnote: For Hitler's Greenie credentials see here For Mussolini's Greenie credentials see here

The brutal terrorist attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, today, were, according to police, perpetrated by a sociopathic Australian. Three others were arrested in connection with the attacks. The assailant killed 50 people and wounded nearly that many more. He live-streamed part of the attack to Facebook, and posted it to other social media outlets — significantly enhancing the profile of this attack. He abandoned his assault and fled only when another man picked up a shotgun the shooter had dropped and fought back.

The primary suspect declared in a lengthy manifesto that he was inspired, in part, by racist fascists who perpetrated attacks in the United States, Canada, and Europe. For that reason, and because he mentioned President Donald Trump as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose” (though condemning some of his policies), the Leftmedia and others, including the Australian prime minister, are parroting the charge that he is a “far-right extremist.” But that’s just not the case.

Of course, after other Islamist terrorist attacks — including Paris, Orlando, San Bernardino, and most notably, the 9/11 attack — these same Leftmedia outlets lectured, ad nauseam, that Islam is the Religion of Peace™, and that we shouldn’t stereotype Muslims by associating all of them with a few extremists.

Fact is, there are brutal Islamic attacks against Christians in the Middle East and Africa daily, with virtually no media notice. But indeed, we should not embrace the stereotype that all Muslims support such violence.

That notwithstanding, we fully expect the Leftmedia’s reporting on this incident, and hate-profiteering by the Southern Poverty Law Center, to focus on the rise of “right wing” hatred in the age of Trump, casting that stereotypical shadow over all those who support Trump. But as we’ve said before, there’s nothing uniquely “right wing” about racism or nationalism.

For the record, the ideological spectrum is better understood as circular, not as linear. And in that sphere, fascism occupies the space between Left and Right. Anyone who asserts that fascism is uniquely “right wing” is either grossly misinformed or intellectually disingenuous. The New Zealand assailant was not what the Leftmedia commonly calls “right wing” — those advocating Liberty, individual rights, and limited government. Far from it.

The New York Times declared, “Writing that he had purposely used guns to stir discord in the United States over the Second Amendment’s provision on the right to bear arms, he also declared himself a fascist. ‘For once, the person that will be called a fascist, is an actual fascist,’ he wrote.”

But the assailant, who spent time in North Korea and Pakistan, specifically declared himself an “Eco-Fascist,” who advocated “Green Nationalism” and supported the socialist views of Bernie Sanders. He railed against humans for destroying the environment and causing global warming, and he advocated government control to stop it. He wrote, “The nation with the closest political and social values to my own is the People’s Republic of China.” That would be Communist China.

Right winger? Hardly.

For his part, President Trump said, “I spoke with Prime Minister Ardern of New Zealand to express the sorrow of our entire nation following the monstrous terror attacks at two mosques. These sacred places of worship were turned into scenes of evil killing. … It’s a horrible, horrible thing.”

A final note: Attacks on houses of worship are, tragically, nothing new. The Associated Press compiled a list of 18 such attacks just over the last decade. Churches, mosques, synagogues — nothing is safe. Such violent hatred is pure evil. Indeed, the assailant bore symbols of Satanism among his belongings. Responsible people should rise above that evil with our run-of-the-mill political disagreements.

As you can see from my blog about him Brian Leiter is not as clever as he thinks he is. So his critique of free speech below goes nowhere. He gets stuck on the rock of how to decide who is competent to censor speech.

His reasoning behind that is however amusing. He says that we get saturated by so much conservative propaganda that we cannot decide what the truth is. I would have thought that it was the overwhelmingly Leftist slant of the mainstream media that made the truth hard to discern. Just count up the number of adverse mentions of Trump to see which way the media lean.

Leiter's words are a typical example of an unrelenting Leftist strategy -- what Freud called projection -- seeing your own faults in others.

But the discussion below does cover the main points at issue in free speech so it has some interest -- JR

By Sean Illing

I don’t consider myself an absolutist about anything — except for free speech.

The value of free expression seems so fundamental to me that it hardly needs a defense. It is, after all, enshrined in the First Amendment of the US Constitution. But like any dogma, there is utility in occasionally challenging the assumptions that undergird it.

Which brings me to a paper I recently read in the Sydney Law Review, titled “The Case Against Free Speech.” The author is Brian Leiter, a political philosopher at the University of Chicago. Leiter argues that we shouldn’t think of free speech as an inherently good thing and that there are negative consequences for pretending that it is.

The sort of speech he’s talking about is public, the kind of stuff we hear on television or read in newspapers. He’s not suggesting we should even think about regulating private or interpersonal speech. And in fact, he doesn’t think we can even regulate public speech, mostly because we just don’t have a reliable way to do it.

But he does raise some interesting objections against what’s often called the “autonomy” defense of free speech, which holds that people are only free to the extent that they’re allowed to say what they want, read what they want, and determine for themselves what is true and what is false.

According to Leiter, this is a bogus argument because people are not actually free in the way we suppose. We’re all conditioned by our environment, and what we want and think are really just products of social, economic, and psychological forces beyond our control. If he’s right, then the “autonomy” defenses of free speech are just wrong, and probably dangerous.

I spoke to Leiter about what he thinks we get wrong about free speech, and why most of the arguments people make in defense of it fall apart when you examine them closely. A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Sean Illing
Let me start by summing up your argument as simply as I can, and then we can go from there. I take you to be saying that most of our public speech, the kind of speech we consider morally and politically serious, is not only useless but actually hinders our collective effort to get at the truth, and therefore we shouldn’t permit its expression without considering the social costs.

Brian Leiter
That’s really close, but I think it’s not quite right in one important respect. Because at the end, I actually argue for a pretty strong libertarian approach to free speech, but not on the grounds that the speech necessarily has value. A lot of it has no value, as you correctly said in your summary.

But basically I don’t think we can be confident that the regulation of speech, or the regulators of speech, would make the right choices in discerning what is good and bad speech, or what is helpful or unhelpful speech. But this says more about the pathologies of the American system than it does about the value of freedom of speech.

Sean Illing
We’ll come back to the regulator problem, because I think it ultimately undercuts any effort we could ever make to control speech. Maybe it’ll help if you first explain why you want to take a sledgehammer to this assumption that free speech is an inherently good thing for society.

Brian Leiter
My paper is about running through all the arguments people make in defense of this assumption and showing why they don’t hold up. I’ll start with the simplest one, which is this idea that a free marketplace of ideas is likely to help promote discovery of the truth. This is probably the most famous defense of free speech associated with the British philosopher John Stuart Mill.

But what people often don’t stop and notice is that even Mill thought certain background conditions had to be established for it to really be true that a marketplace of ideas would lead to the discovery of the truth. Mill said, “People have to be educated, and they have to be mature.” Those are pretty thin conditions, and you might worry that a lot more is required for a real marketplace of ideas to be conducive to the truth.

As I point out, we have an important institution in American society that aims to discover the truth, namely the court system. And the striking thing about the court system is that it completely rejects the marketplace of ideas view. It says, “It’s crazy to think we’ll discover the truth by just permitting people to express any view they want, make any claim they want.” In the court system, we impose massive restrictions on speech to facilitate the discovery of truth.

Sean Illing
Okay, I’m glad you brought up your court analogy. Here’s my problem: A courtroom and a political community are wildly different contexts, which even you acknowledge in the article. To take just one difference: A court’s job is to establish the facts so that jurists can decide accordingly. But politics is about values as much as facts. Is there any way for a community to decide how to live and what’s worth pursuing without allowing the free exchange of ideas?

Brian Leiter
Fair question. I would disagree a bit with the assumption that politics is mainly about values rather than facts. An awful lot of politics is about facts and their relationship to the values that can be realized in concrete policies.

So take one of the examples I use: the Bush administration’s efforts to justify the illegal war of aggression against Iraq in 2003. That turned heavily on the misrepresentation of the facts. It turned heavily on Fox News, in particular, indoctrinating a large part of the population into thinking there was some connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda when there was none.

And then take something like climate change, where there’s a constant disagreement about the facts with so-called skeptics who insist, in the public sphere, that the science doesn’t really establish this. These are fact disputes, not value disputes.

I certainly agree with you that there are value disputes, but the establishment of facts is hugely important.

Sean Illing
Just to be clear, I’m not saying facts don’t matter. I’m saying politics is about deciding what we ought to do in light of what is. And in order to have that kind of conservation, we need the free exchange of ideas.

Brian Leiter
Again, I’d resist that a little bit. I think most of our disputes are about factual questions. I mean, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren aren’t saying, “In order to promote the values of equality and well-being, we need higher taxes on the rich.” And the other side isn’t saying, “We’re not interested in equality or freedom.” They say, “We don’t think that’s the way to realize those values.”

Sean Illing
I disagree about that, but I don’t want tumble down a rabbit hole here, so let’s stay on topic. Is there any way to maintain a free society without simply accepting that most opinions on serious topics are bad and ill informed, and yet that’s the price we pay for allowing citizens to express their political identity?

Brian Leiter
There is clearly a lot of value to people in letting them express their political identity, their moral views, and so on. It’s important to people’s well-being to be able to speak their mind. I don’t want to discount the value of that. I just think that’s one value that should go into a broader calculation that takes into account all the harms that are related to the expression of certain kinds of views.

Sean Illing
Do you think people are free in any meaningful sense if what they’re allowed to hear, or see, or read, is controlled or constrained in any way?

Brian Leiter
It depends on what kind of control and regulation is involved. So I’ll give you another analogy. I control what the students in my class read and discuss. I actually think this enhances their freedom and their autonomy by bringing to their attention substantive materials, helping them frame thinking about these particular issues, and so on. So regulation isn’t necessarily incompatible with free thinking.

But that brings us back to the question I touched on at the very beginning. The best argument for broad freedom of expression is skepticism about whether those who would regulate expression would do so in a way that was productive and constructive, rather than simply making things worse.

Sean Illing
Although you keep expressing skepticism, you still seem to think we’d be better off with gatekeepers — some institution or body of institutions that decides what should or shouldn’t be expressed in the public sphere.

Brian Leiter
That would seem to be the conclusion following from the arguments in the first part of the paper. But my conclusion is that even if there isn’t enough positive value to speech to justify its unfettered expression, there are certainly reasons to be worried about whether capitalist democracies will regulate speech in ways that aren’t simply pernicious.

But this has more to do with the pathologies of our political system than it does to do with the intrinsic value of speech. That’s one of the main points I’m pressing on in this article.

Sean Illing
As I read your paper, I kept thinking about the media critic Walter Lippmann (whom I wrote about for Vox), who struggled with these same questions. He didn’t think most people could be trusted to decide intelligently what ought to be done, so he wanted technocrats and experts to act as mediators of sorts. But the problem is always, who are the arbiters of worthy speech in this imagined order? And how will we stop them from abusing their power?

Brian Leiter
Under the current circumstances, I think that’s exactly right. But I’ll also quote the German philosopher Herbert Marcuse, who, when asked, “Who will make these decisions,” said, “Who makes them now?” And that’s worth bearing in mind.

These decisions are, in fact, being made now. They just aren’t being made by bureaucrats. They’re being made by Rupert Murdoch, by editors behind the scenes, by producers on TV programs, who themselves are responsive to all kinds of interested parties.

Sean Illing
What’s the alternative? We either live in a free society, or we don’t. There does not seem to be much room for compromise here. I mean, there’s no marketplace of ideas that isn’t saturated with bad ideas, right?

Brian Leiter
I guess it’s a matter of degree. Again, I think the big problem now has to do with the pathologies of our political and economic system. Maybe what we need is for the political and economic system to change if we’re ever going to adopt a more sensible approach to the regulation of expression.

I also think most people fail to understand what’s meant by “free society.” No one thinks we don’t live in a free society because there are restrictions on public masturbation or public sex, right? There are always limits. We countenance all kinds of restrictions on freedom. It’s always about trade-offs, and what we’re ultimately willing to live with.

Sean Illing
Well, I’d say free speech is crucial to individual liberty in a way that, say, public masturbation isn’t, but that’s another argument. It’s still not clear to me what you’d have us do? What is the solution here?

Brian Leiter
It’s important to recognize that most of what any of us believe about the world depends on intermediaries, people who guide us as to what we ought to believe because it’s true. I believe in evolution by natural selection, but not because I did all the experiments in the lab.

The big crisis of the internet era is that it has eliminated a lot of the traditional intermediaries, such as the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or PBS or the BBC and so on. Those old intermediaries weren’t perfect, but they were better than what we have now. So I think we need better intermediaries that help people to sort out the world.

But again, I don’t anticipate a law being passed that shuts down Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh — we’re stuck with them. Which means we’re stuck with a public sphere filled with nonsense. So the short answer is that we’re screwed.

Sean Illing
Look, the ideal political system is one in which everyone is wise and discerning and cares very deeply about the truth. But such a system is not possible, has never been possible, and so we must live in the least imperfect and most just society possible. Has liberal democracy not proven to be just that?

Brian Leiter
I’m not sure it’s that simple. Liberal democratic societies have certain values, and they’re mostly good. But the problem is having a capitalist economic system that pollutes the public domain and presents all sorts of obstacles to the intelligent expression and regulation of speech.

Under capitalism, at least the sort of capitalism we have now, the ruling class completely distorts our political process and the laws that get enacted. Until we do something about that, we’re not going to be in any position to hope that regulation of speech, let alone other aspects of law, will actually be conducive to human well-being.

Sean Illing
This is ultimately why I don’t know what to do with your paper. I agree with your general diagnosis here, and yet we end up in a dead end.

Brian Leiter
Well, if I may reference one of my favorite philosophers, whom I know you like as well, Nietzsche said, “Sometimes the truth is terrible.” And I think there’s value in recognizing the truth of our situation, even if it’s terrible.

We have massive amounts of worthless, dangerous speech in the public sphere right now, and at the same time I can’t see any legal remedy that isn’t likely to be used for even more pernicious ends. But the situation we’re currently in is quite dire, and the fact that we have a monster child as our president is proof of that fact.

Sean Illing
Given everything you’ve said, given the paucity of realistic solutions, what’s the point of an article like this? Why make the case against free speech if there aren’t any viable means of improving speech?

Brian Leiter
The fact that there aren’t solutions now isn’t a reason not to identify a problem. And of course, one point of the article is to challenge what I think is a slightly unthinking popular consensus. Free speech isn’t an inherently good thing; it can be good or it can be bad, and normally we think of the law as something that can step in when things can be both good or bad, like operating a motor vehicle, for example, which is why we have rules about it.

But in the case of speech, we have good reason to be worried about whether we’ll make the right rules. And therefore, the real question that we need to talk about isn’t about assuming the intrinsic value of speech. It’s about why we have a political and economic order that makes it impossible for us to regulate all the bad things about speech in a reliable way.

I found it curious how thoroughly the NZ gunman's manifesto was censored. He sent out many copies but most recipients announced proudly that they were not going to release their copy. It was only with a fair bit of scouring that I was able to get hold of a copy.

So what motivated the censorship? What ideas in it were so dangerous that they must be kept from us by our soi disant betters? Let me offer a rough summary:

There WERE dangerous ideas in it: But very ordinary ideas, the sort of ideas that are widespread in Western countries. There are majorities in all Western countries which want the flood of Third world immigrants stopped. And where those majorities are large enough, the governments of the countries concerned have taken measures that have largely stopped at least the illegal sources of such immigration: Australia, Norway and most of Eastern Europe. Even in those countries, however, there are substantial inflows of Third worlders who are accepted legally as "refugees", though many are clearly not true refugees.

Because disrupting the "complacent" societies they live in is the whole aim of most Leftists, however, Leftists do their best to oppose immigration restrictions and brand immigration opponents with every derogatory name under the sun, of which "racist" is the mildest. Despite his record of support `for minorities, even Mr. Trump is routinely branded by the Left as a "racist" because of his efforts to protect America's borders from a Third world influx.

Given the Leftist role in supporting the undermining of Western societies, it is left to the conservative side of politics to articulate the common desire to retain their existing social and national arrangements. It is conservative writers who point to the adverse aspects of largely uncontrolled immigration. They point to the frequency of immigrant crime and the serious stretching of public services (schools, hospitals, roads) that heavy inflows of low quality immigration causes. They also point out where demographic projections lead: The much higher immigrant birthrates point to formerly Western countries becoming in time predominantly Third World countries, with the crime, poverty and general disruption that entails

And the NZ gunman in his manifesto echoes those concerns. There is nothing new in his manifesto. It is largely just a compilation of the things that non-Leftists have been saying about Third world immigration. He is particularly concerned about Muslim immigration because of Islam's aggressive contempt for Western civilization. He sees Muslims becoming in time an intolerant majority in many Western countries, which will bring hard times for non-Muslims. And the fate of Christians in existing Muslim lands certainly bears out such concerns

So what is different about the NZ gunman? Is he mentally ill? Does he have a personality disorder? There is no sign of it. Reports from people who know him generally describe him as a normal pleasant person.

So is he a white supremacist? It is rather to the contrary. Far from seeing whites as supreme he sees them as vulnerable and threatened, which is roughly the opposite of supreme. He is not even much of a racist. He speaks warmly of the Pakistanis he met on his visit there and names his chief inspiration as a prominent BLACK American conservative, Candice Owens. And he is certainly no nationalist, white or otherwise. He is an internationalist concerned for the whole of Western society.

What appears to have set him off is his travels. He has travelled to a bewildering variety of countries and has taken particular note of the immigrant influence there. And what he has seen and heard of the foul deeds of Jihadis has particularly disgusted and enraged him. So under heavy pressure of Jihadi reality, he has decided that he should do something about it. For most of us, Jihadi deeds are something that happen somewhere else and have little personal impact on us -- so we put it all out of our minds. His travels, by contrast, brought it all to the front of his mind.

So it should be clear why the Left are having orgasms over the manifesto. It shares with normal conservative writing a dislike of Muslim influences and a wish for immigration restrictions. To the Left that brands all conservatives as potential terrorists and all-round bad eggs. But that is guilt by association and a violation of natural justice. And even the association is absurdly weak. Who is typical of conservatives, the hundreds of millions of conservatives who do NOT become terrorists or the one man who does?

With the Left, on the other hand the association is much clearer and more troubling. When Leftists gain unrestricted power -- as with Leftists from Robespierre to Stalin to Mao -- we see where the real murderous potential lies. Unless restrained by powerful other influences, Leftism always leads to tyranny and mass murder. The deeds of their philosophical allies in other countries ARE a realistic guide to the potential of Western Leftists.

In the unlikely event that they had any humility and balance, Leftists would be asking whether their repeated defence and coverup of Muslim hostility had any role in pushing the NZ gunman into his pushback against Muslim terrorism. On November 5, 2009, for instance, a mass shooting took place at Fort Hood, near Killeen, Texas when Muslim Nidal Hasan fatally shot 13 people and injured more than 30 others. Rather than Muslim terrorism, the Obama administration insisted that the event had to be referred to as "workplace violence" -- an epic coverup.

To return to the shooter: Vengeance is a normal human motivation. It is probably always unwise and is definitely unChristian but it can be a powerful force. It is perhaps forgiveable where the vengeance targets the original offender but it all too often spreads more widely than that. And on this occasion it did. For the gunman the problem was a group of people so a group had to be the target. It is deplorable that the people he targeted were as far as we know innocent men, women and children. But jihadis target innocent men, women and children too so he no doubt thought that they had set the relevant precedent.

I am not going to put up the manifesto on any of my sites. The all-wise Leftist controllers of our social media would undoubtedly take it down if I did and they might even take down the whole site. That is why I have offered this summary in lieu of the whole thing. Even this summary and this site could be attacked however so I have taken the defensive measure of not naming the gunman. It seems to me that the hostiles will use his surname as a search term for locating posts such as mine but, because of my defensive measures will not pick this post up immediately. Regular readers will thus get to see it first.

I am however prepared to email a copy of the manifesto to anyone who is otherwise unable to obtain it.

Fact-checking Trump's notion that white nationalism is not a rising threat

Having enemies seems to be a good political tactic. It can mobilize your base. It is a tactic much used by the Left. They exaggerate even the slightest opposition to their schemes -- and anything untowards happening in the world is due to bad men whom they know all about. And a favourite mythical beast that they are fighting is "white nationalists" or a "white supremacists". Anybody who mentions any human group can be declared a "white supremacist" at the drop of a hat. And often you don't even need to drop the hat.

So anybody who is critical of the doings of any Muslim becomes an "Islamophobe" for starters and he doesn't have to say much more to become a "white supremacist".

No doubt there are some real white supremacists about the place. Some people believe that the earth is flat. But do they exist in any numbers? There is no evidence of it. There are some people who attack minorities from time to time but none of them seems to be part of any organization or even have many friends. And why would anybody be bothered to proclaim white supremacy when it is perfectly obvious that whites do have overwhelming influence in the world? You might as well go around making proclamations that that the sky is blue.

So Mr Trump was right when he said recently of white nationalists that "I think it's a small group of people that have very, very serious problems"

But that could not be allowed to pass, of course. And CNN did a "fact check" of what Trump said. It is below. And they do list a number of individuals whom they allege to be white supremacists -- but at no point do they make the slightest effort to show that any of the individuals concerned were in fact white supremacists. If they were truly white supremacists a sentence or two from each of them confirming that they were white supremacists would have given the needed confirmation.

But no such evidence is given, We are expected to accept the assertions of CNN as all the evidence we need.

Just to illustrate how quickly they would become unglued if they tried to back up their assertions, just consider the man of the hour, the NZ gunman. Every leftist alive would fervently assure us that he is a white supremacist despite that fact that many of his targets were a passable shade of white. Does that upset the applecart at all? If it doesn't, try this: The person whom the gunman stated was the greatest influence on him was Candace Owens. Candace is an American black. So is the gunman a black supremacist? In the insane world of the Left, he might as well be.

On my reading of his manifesto he is principally concerned about the large influx of foreigners into European-origin countries. He identifies with white Europeans and sees himself as conducting a defensive operation. He is not asserting the dominance or superiority of white Europeans but simply wants them not to fade away under immigration pressures. He says that wherever he goes he sees invaders and that disturbs him. So he is certainly a racist of sorts but not a white supremacist.

Is he a white nationalist? Maybe but that depends on your definition of nationalism. On Orwell's definition he is not, as he shows no interest in conquering other countries

So Mr Trump again gets it right. Even the NZ gunman is arguably not a white nationalist. He is in fact something of an internationalist. His concern is for the survival of European civilization as a whole

During a press conference Friday, President Donald Trump was asked if he "see(s) today that white nationalism is a rising threat around the world?" in the wake of the terrorist attacks on two mosques in New Zealand, which left at least 50 dead.

"I don't really. I think it's a small group of people that have very, very serious problems, I guess," the President said. "If you look at what happened in New Zealand, perhaps that's the case, I don't know enough about it yet. They're just learning about the person and the people involved. But it's certainly a terrible thing."

The man charged with murder in the New Zealand attack cited a list of white nationalists who inspired him in his putative manifesto posted online.

Facts First: White nationalism is certainly a rising threat in the US, with plenty of evidence to back it up.

In the past two years there have been a number of high profile incidents involving white nationalists, perhaps most notably the Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. One woman was killed and 19 were injured when a speeding car slammed into a throng of counter-protesters.

Last year's shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh claimed the lives of 11 people. Federal prosecutors charged the gunman, an avowed white nationalist, with hate crimes. In February, authorities arrested a Coast Guard lieutenant, an alleged white supremacist, who was planning an attack on several television anchors and elected officials.

The data suggests these are all part of a broader rise in white nationalism across the US.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an organization focused on tracking extremist activity, found last year that white supremacist murders in the US "more than doubled in 2017," with far-right extremist groups and white supremacists "responsible for 59 percent of all extremist-related fatalities in the U.S. in 2017." They were responsible for 20% of these fatalities the year before.

"This attack (in New Zealand) underscores a trend that ADL has been tracking: that modern white supremacy is an international threat that knows no borders, being exported and globalized like never before," ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a press release.

ADL also reported that propaganda efforts from white supremacist groups increased by 182% in the US in 2018; causing the number of incidents to jump from 421 the previous year to 1,187.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think-tank based in Washington, DC, reports that "the number of terrorist attacks (in the US) by far-right perpetrators rose over the past decade, more than quadrupling between 2016 and 2017."

White nationalism, supremacism, and far-right extremist attacks and propaganda are on the rise. The President is incorrect in suggesting that these groups do not present a growing threat.

Domestic terrorism -- as a whole -- has seen a recent uptick in the US, with nearly 25 related arrests in the last three months of 2018, an FBI official told CNN. These cases are separate from plots relating to international terrorism investigations, like those involving al Qaeda and ISIS.

As CNN recently reported, the FBI has approximately 900 open domestic terror investigations.

Almost as bad as the massacre itself are the false media claims about it. It is invariably said that the gunman was "right wing" or "far right". What in conservative thought justifies the killing of the innocents? There is nothing.

What we do know is that the gunman isued a manifesto that is decribed as full of Nazi ideas. But Nazism was a socialist sect. Conservatives -- such as Churchill -- opposed Nazism. It is nothing more than a survival of Soviet disinformation that says Nazism is rightist. Hitler was to the right of Communism but to the left of just about everyone else. Ever since the French revolution it is the Left who have been the mass murderers --Robespierre, Trotsky, Stalin, Hitler, Mao -- not conservatives -- and that was again true in Christchurch.

One thing that was Leftist about the gunman even by modern standards was his identifying himself as a representative of a group -- Western whites. He saw the Jihadi attacks on Western whites as attacks on a group that he identified with and that he wished to save. The Jihadi attacks were attacks on his people. And identity politics are a major obsession of Leftists at the moment. They try to divide everyone into groups -- blacks, whites, homosexuals, transsexuals women etc. And they then treat people according to their group identity. Conservatives, by contrast, treat people primarily as individuals.

And the gunman did make it abundantly clear that his actions were provoked by Muslim hostility towards Western whites as evidenced in the innumerable attacks on Westerners by Jihadis. He did not act at random. He was provoked. So those who provoked him bear at least some of the blame for what he did. Muslims should be deeply thankful that the Jihadis who arise from among their ranks so seldom provoke a violent reaction.

It may be however that the Christchurch massacre is the harbinger of things to come. It may not be the last time that someone horrified by Jihadi violence decides to strike back. If Muslims want to avoid that they should urge their Mullahs to stop preaching Jihad. Jihadis mostly seem to strike at random so Muslims too could be struck at random. It would be a great pity if bloody attacks on Muslims were the only thing capable of persuading Muslims to desist from attacking others.

Australian government urged to shut down Milo Yiannopoulos after Christchurch massacre

This is a typical despicable Leftist attempt to blame uninvolved others for the deeds of one man. It all hinges on the Leftist inability to see people as individuals. Leftists see people only as group members and reserve to themselves the right to say who belongs in which group. It would not be stretching their logic too far to say that Tarrant was born in Australia so therefore all Australians (including members of the Labor party!) bear a responsibility for his Christchurch attack.

I wouldn't be surprised if some Leftists do assert that. They might say (they do say) that Australia is racist and Tarrant was therefore simply expressing Australian racism

The claim below that what Leftists call "hate speech" leads to terrorist acts such as Tarrant's is an empty assertion untethered to any evidence. David Hume pointed out a couple of hundred years ago that to identify a cause you have to have constant conjunction between the cause and the effect. And there is no conjunction at all between what Leftists call "hate speech" and acts of terrorism by whites. Tens of millions of whites have heard words such as those by Yiannopoulos so where are are the acts of terrorism connected to them? The usual reaction to Yiannopoloulos is no reaction other than, perhaps, a nod of the head.

If there are ten million instances of a "cause" NOT leading to an alleged effect, that destroys the causal claim. The effect needs something else to cause it. In Tarrant's case, he seems to have seen a lot of the effects of Jihadi attacks during his extensive travels and that has enraged him.

The Australian government has been told it must cancel the visa for far-right speaker Milo Yiannopoulos following the Christchurch terrorist attack, with opposition frontbencher Tony Burke saying far-right extremism should be treated in the same way as other forms of terrorism.

The immigration minister, David Coleman, personally approved Yiannopoulos’s visa last week, against advice from the Department of Home Affairs, which earlier told Yiannopoulos he may fail the character test to enter Australia.

Burke, who is Labor’s spokesman for citizenship and multiculturalism, said rules around banning people who could be seen as supporting terrorism should be applied to all extremist ideologies.

“If someone wants to come to Australia and we know that they’ve been speaking in support of values that have given rise to other forms of terrorism, we don’t give them a visa,” Burke told ABC24.

“Only a few days ago, the government intervened against the department to provide a visa for someone to have a tour here in Australia to whip up hatred against Muslims. I would be stunned if the government goes ahead with that visa.”

The department has the ability to block a visa from a person on character grounds if it perceives there’s a risk they will commit a crime, harass people, vilify a segment of the Australian community or incite discord.

Recent speaking tours of US whistleblower Chelsea Manning and British conspiracy theorist and anti-semite David Icke were blocked after their visas were rejected on character grounds.

“We knock back people all the time with respect to other forms of hatred that have been consistent with what has resulted in terrorism actions,” Burke said. “We need to make sure the full force of the law treats this as the same as any other form of terrorism.”

Guardian Australia contacted Coleman’s office to ask if Yiannopoulos’s visa would be revoked after the Christchurch attack and did not receive an immediate response.

The prime minister, Scott Morrison, has called Friday’s massacre a “violent, extremist, right-wing terrorist attack” and also condemned comments from Queensland senator Fraser Anning, saying that “blaming the murderous attacks by a violent, right-wing, extremist terrorist in New Zealand on immigration are disgusting”.

“Those views have no place in Australia, let alone the Australian parliament,” Morrison said.

The Labor foreign affairs spokeswoman, Penny Wong, said Anning did not represent Australia.

Burke also criticised Anning’s comments but said: “the normalisation of bigotry is something that is not only confined to him.”

He said the use of hate speech was connected to violence and extremism and should be taken more seriously.

“There’s been an attempt in Australia by many people to normalise hate speech,” Burke said. “We get told, ‘Oh, it’s just freedom of speech’.”

He said that view had been pushed by “some [television] networks” and said the normalisation of hate speech was “not the whole story of what’s happened, but there is no doubt it is part of it”.

The Australian man charged with murder over the Christchurch attack was not on a terrorist watchlist, and Burke said it was possible that “up until now, many people would not have viewed this form of extremism as being as dangerous to people as every other form of extremism”.

John Tomlinson is a welfare academic. In the far-Left "New Matilda" he writes:

"I have always had a grudging tolerance for the classical conservative position with its defence of the established order, a belief in the imperfection of human beings, the necessity of privilege and leadership. Associated with the conservative position is adherence to traditional values (such as the primacy of the extended family), the importance of work and of sexual restraint, the sanctity of private property and an abhorrence of utopian social change."

That's not a bad definition of conservatism. The thing he leaves out of the definition, however, is the key to his whole attack on Australian conservatism. He leaves out the importance of individual responsibility. He clearly believes instead in social responsibility. He sees no problem in taking money off people who have earned it and giving it to people who have not earned it. Conservatives do see a moral problem there but in a classical conservative way resort to compromise: Do it but limit it as far as possible. Tomlinson is clearly uninterested in limits to redistribution.

He seems in fact to be uninterested in balance of any sort. Take his comments on Cardinal Pell. That anybody might take a nuanced view of His Eminence fills him with rage. He writes:

"Amongst those who gave court character references there was a ‘Craven’ vice chancellor of the Catholic University, an ex-‘socially conservative’ prime minister who had a track record of being reluctant to sack ex-Governor General, Peter Hollingsworth (who had previously been an Anglican Archbishop, who was, at the time, enmeshed in his own scandal).

It takes a particular style of myogenous, misanthropic troglodyte, with a total commitment to turning away from the obvious towards the promotion of arch-conservatism to stand where these men found themselves. They can’t claim to have been blinded by God, and fear and light – it is just that they have lost sight of any sense of right.

Then, of course, there were the trainee galahs in the media such as Andrew Bolt and Janet Albrechtsen who despite, the twelve and true finding Pell guilty of five counts of child molestation, declared the Cardinal innocent.

Howard, Craven, Albrechtsen and Bolt are all part of a right-wing putsch determined to drive out decency and humanity from our nation. But are they conservatives in the classical meaning of the term? In Howard’s court reference for Pell he writes:

“I am aware he has been convicted of those charges; that an appeal against the conviction has been lodged and that he maintains his innocence in respect of these charges. None of these matters alter my opinion of the Cardinal.

“Cardinal Pell is a person of both high intelligence and exemplary character. Strength and sincerity have always been features of his personality. I have always found him to be lacking hypocrisy and cant. In his chosen vocation he has frequently displayed much courage and held to his values and beliefs, irrespective of the prevailing wisdom of the time.”

I suppose that when Pell was rabidly denouncing gay sex, same sex marriage, abortion, divorce, adultery and environmentalism Howard considered him to be “displaying much courage and holding to his values and beliefs, irrespective of the prevailing wisdom of the time”. Clearly as the same sex plebiscite established, Pell was neither reflecting the general will nor the wisdom of the time.

The schmozzle of ideas professed by Pell, Howard, Craven, Albrechtsen and Bolt seem to have little to do with sexual constraint or conservatism generally but rather more to do with a particular reading of a neoliberal, protofascist conception of conservatism.
That anyone should doubt the guilt of His Eminence can only be due to foul motives in Tomlinson's view. The thought that His Eminence might be the victim of a wrongful conviction cannot apparently be allowed into Tomlinson's mind. If Tomlinson had any kind of balance in his mind he might have considered the prosecution ongoing in Britain at the moment of the fantasist "Nick" -- a man who did immense damage with his lies. His Eminence was convicted on one count by one accuser. Could that accuser also be a fantasist? His story was certainly replete with improbabilities

And wrongful convictions generally are a dime a dozen. Black men are exonerated of serious crimes in the USA on an almost weekly basis. Are Catholics seen as negatively to some people in Australia as blacks are in America?

We have certainly seen other instances of wrongful convictions that seem to have arisen from a jaundiced view of a group to which an innocent person belongs. Take the notorious case of Welsh footballer Ched Evans. Evans spent a couple of years in jail and had a couple of unsuccessful appeals before he was finally exonerated. So how come? Evan was convicted of rape under the leadership of a gaggle of feminist officials even though the alleged rapee had consented and had never lodged any complaint about Evans. The big mistake Evans made appears to have been being a typical footballer -- a type anathema to feminists. The one male involved in the prosecution thought Evans had no case to answer.

The two examples I have just given are from Britain but Australians will remember the quite notorious case of Lindy Chamberlain -- where a devout Christian woman -- wife of a Pastor -- was convicted of murdering her baby -- on precisely zero evidence. She was however a Seventh Day Adventist and a redneck jury apparently saw that as "weird" and making the woman capable of anything. She spent some years in prison before she was finally exonerated.

So conservatives -- such as myself -- are simply being cautious until we know the outcome of his Eminence's appeal. Could he have been convicted not because of anything he did personally but because of the evil deeds of others in his church? Being cautious is very conservative, after all. It may even be definitional of conservatism. The foul motives that Tomlinson attributes to conservatives in relation to Cardinal Pell in reality reveal the foul and bigoted mind of John Tomlinson.

Prophecy is a mug's game. Something like 95% of prophecies don't turn out. But there is a class of prophecy that does turn out: Prophecies based on a correct understanding of natural phenomena. The big challenge there is "correct". Warmists think that CO2 warms the earth. But that is demonstrably not correct. There is no synchrony between the two. But prophesying the position of the earth relative to the other planets at any one time can be done with great accuracy because we do have a very good and correct knowledge of orbital dynamics.

And in principle, the same applies with regard to all other natural phenomena, including what people do. The social sciences exist because people think they can see regularities in human behaviour and once you have a regularity, accurate prophecy should be possible. And in economics that definitely happens. If you restrict the supply of something, its price will go up, for instance. It always does.

But when you get into the other social sciences prophecy is rarely possible. My academic background is principally in psychology and the only sound generalization from human psychology that I know of that has much in the way of real-life application is the generalization that your educational success will be almost entirely a product of your IQ.

But as well as my background in psychology, I also have a substantial background in sociology and economics. I taught in a sociology school for a number of years and I am also a former high School economics teacher. So it would seem possible that a combination of three social science disciplines might occasionally enable accurate prophecies. And I have repeatedly found that it does. What I think will happen or should happen in the world of politics often does end up actually happening. I am a pretty good knowledge-based prophet.

So far I have never put one of my prophecies into writing so perhaps it is now time that I did. I may be hilariously wrong but I can handle that. And what I want to prophecy is quite daring. I want to forecast both the verdicts and the reasoning of both the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court of the United States. And I dare to do that without having any formal knowledge of law or any legal qualifications. So I am setting myself a very difficult task indeed. I am setting myself up for a fall but it will be fun if nothing else

I refer to the Emergency Declaration that President Trump is using to fund his wall. It generally takes a while for matters to come up before a court but it should fairly quickly come before the 9th Circus. I anticipate that there will be 4 arguments put to the court in favour of the declaration:

1). The courts have no jurisdiction over how the Commander in chief discharges his duties. It is for the commander to command and he, not the courts, has the final word about that. So he can therefore use military resources to build a wall. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers carries out many tasks without explicit congressional authority and a wall is just another example of that.

There are some legal restrictions on what the commander can do with the military but none mention wall building. And even the restrictions that do exist are customarily applied only lightly. Many wars have been initiated without the authority of Congress, for instance

2). Since passage of the National Emergencies Act in 1976, every U.S. President has declared multiple national emergencies, so Trump is not doing anything out of line. And 123 enumerated powers are invoked by an executive declaration with no Congressional input. This should actually be the core issue in the case and will no doubt be examined in great detail so I will say no further about that approach. The sudden arrival of whole caravans of illegals could well be held to be an emergency requiring extra powers.

3). Reallocating funds away from their original purpose is routine so again Trump is well within precedent. He could do his intended reallocation of funds even WITHOUT an Emergency declaration. To deny him that customary right would greatly hobble all future administrations and cast into legal limbo many past funding arrangements. That is surely not to be done lightly.

4). Government by regulation is already well established. Mr Obama used his "pen and phone" to circumvent Congress on some quite major matters -- notably the creation of DACA immigrants. Trump is simply trying to ENFORCE the law by using regulatory powers. Obama explicity CREATED a whole class of new law with no Congressional authority. The courts have so far upheld the authority of the DACA declaration so it should be merely consistent to uphold Trump's much less innovative declaration.

This argument, by the way, is a complete answer to the idiocy of Rand Paul, who says he will vote against the emergency declaration in the Senate because he fears what a future Democrat president will do with the precedent. He forgets that the precedent has already been set -- by Obama -- and that Trump's declaration sets no new precedent. Rand Paul is doing a classical act of trying to close the door after the horse has escaped.

So I am pretty sure that at least one of those arguments will ultimately prevail. There is even a possibility that one will prevail at the 9th Circuit level. Let me go out on a limb and prophecy that the 9th Circuit with find the emergency declaration improper but will allow that Trump is nonetheless entitled to build his wall using recycled funds because recycling funds has strong precedent. If that is the verdict, the matter will probably not go to SCOTUS. If it does go to SCOTUS, they will probably use that reasoning too.

This piece of research must have been frustrating to its authors. They found that the presumed evil -- farm runoff -- actually HELPED the barrier reef. So they had to do a lot of scratching to turn that around

The big drama about the reef is that it undergoes periodic bleaching -- when the coral expels its symbiotic algae. Nobody likes the look of that but the corals mostly recover after a while. So that is what all good men and true rally to prevent. STOP the bleaching! And now we have found something that prevents it to a degree: Farm runoff! How big a disappointment can you get? Farm runoff was supposed to KILL the reef!

But by scratching around in their data, the authors found something to warm their pessimistic hearts. They found that once the coral had been harmed by some "disturbance", farm runoff hindered recovery to some degree. But if coral amid farm runoff is less damaged in the first place, does that not make the recovery rate of less concern?

Not so fast! The authors say. You have got to balance one effect against another to get an overall conclusion and we have got this nifty little model that will do just that! So we run the model and we find that that a "6–17% improvement in water quality will be necessary to bring recovery rates in line with projected increases in coral bleaching".

So there's the African-American in the woodpile! It is all based on a "projection", or in layman's terms, a guess. And the projection is heroic. They ASSUME that global warming will steadily increase and they ASSUME that warming is the main cause of coral bleaching. There are large scientific arguments against both those assumptions so if we take them away what is left? Two people can play the projection game so I project that farm runoff is on balance neither helpful nor harmful so that Nothing needs to be done. Nothing! Horrors!

My comments so far spring just from a reading of the abstract. I shudder to think what I would find if I studied the whole article. I taught applied statistics at a major Australian university for a number of years so I know the tricks researchers get up to if their results don't suit them. There were so many collaborators on this article that something HAD to come out of it. Re-running their model with more cautious assumptions would be a ball of fun.

I follow the press release below with the journal abstract

Scientific research published today on the impacts of poor water quality on some Great Barrier Reef corals shows why it’s vital the Queensland Government passes new rules on farm pollution, the Australian Marine Conservation Society (AMCS) says.

The study, published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, found corals in the central and southern sections of the reef would need improvements in water quality of between six and 17 per cent to keep their recovery rates in line with projected increases in coral bleaching.

Corals exposed to poor water quality were also more susceptible to disease and outbreaks of Crown of Thorns starfish, the study found.

Proposed Queensland government laws would phase out harmful farming practices that cause pollution and sediment to run into rivers and out into the reef.

Dr Lissa Schindler, AMCS Great Barrier Reef campaign manager, said: “We need to give the Great Barrier Reef the clean water it needs to recover, and this study shows that clearly. The Queensland Government’s proposals to cut farm pollution need to be passed.”

“What this study also says is that these levels of cuts to farm pollution won’t be enough to save corals on outer reefs from the impacts of rising ocean temperatures caused by global warming.

“We have to make sure we are giving the reef the cleanest water we can, while at the same time stopping the digging up and burning of fossil fuels that drive the warming in the reef’s waters.”

Schindler said while the study found that corals in areas with poor water quality were more resistant to coral bleaching, due to the low level of light penetrating the turbid water, these corals had slower recovery rates and were more susceptible to disease and Crown of thorns starfish outbreaks.

The study, acknowledged that any marginal bleaching protection corals might get from poor water quality “are probably overwhelmed by the most extreme warming conditions” already seen during 2016 and 2017.

Schindler said it was also important to note the study did not consider any impacts of coral bleaching in the vast and once pristine northern sections of the reef that were hit hardest by extreme ocean temperatures in 2016 and 2017.

Media release AMCS communications manager Ingrid Neilson 0421 972 731

Water quality mediates resilience on the Great Barrier Reef

M. Aaron MacNeil et al.

Abstract

Threats from climate change and other human pressures have led to widespread concern for the future of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef (GBR). Resilience of GBR reefs will be determined by their ability to resist disturbances and to recover from coral loss, generating intense interest in management actions that can moderate these processes. Here we quantify the effect of environmental and human drivers on the resilience of southern and central GBR reefs over the past two decades. Using a composite water quality index, we find that while reefs exposed to poor water quality are more resistant to coral bleaching, they recover from disturbance more slowly and are more susceptible to outbreaks of crown-of-thorns starfish and coral disease—with a net negative impact on recovery and long-term hard coral cover. Given these conditions, we find that 6–17% improvement in water quality will be necessary to bring recovery rates in line with projected increases in coral bleaching among contemporary inshore and mid-shelf reefs. However, such reductions are unlikely to buffer projected bleaching effects among outer-shelf GBR reefs dominated by fast-growing, thermally sensitive corals, demonstrating practical limits to local management of the GBR against the effects of global warming.

Facebook has serious concerns about the competition watchdog's proposed news and advertising regulator, fearing it could disrupt Australians' newsfeeds

Facebook are afraid that instead of being the censor, they may become censored. But they are going off half-cocked. All that is proposed so far is information gathering. They must be afraid of what people will find. As we learn from John 3: 19-20, the children of the light love the light and the children of the darkness love the darkness.

Libertarians regularly propose information as an alternative to regulation so this step may well be on the right track towards bringing some accountability to what is undoubtedly a bigoted organization. With the Australian government watching, Australian conservatives may be less likely to be obliterated by this rogue organization

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission in December released a preliminary report into the impact digital platforms are having on competition in local media and advertising.

The ACCC recommended a regulatory authority be given the power to "monitor, investigate and report" on how news and advertising is ranked on digital platforms.

Facebook executives insist they want to work with the federal government on policy but took issue with a number of the watchdog's recommendations during a Sydney briefing with reporters.

Facebook argues a number of the recommendations - such as the government-regulated ranking system - could cause "significant harm".

"The proposed level of regulatory intervention for the news regulator and ad regulator is unprecedented as far as I've seen," Facebook competition spokeswoman Samantha Knox said on Wednesday.

"Our view is that people, and not regulators, should decide what you see on (your) newsfeed. "The point of Facebook is to connect you with friends and family and content that you care about. It is not to be primarily a channel of news distribution."

The social media giant's Australia and New Zealand public policy director, Mia Garlick, said the regulations would favour certain publishers.

She argued users should control what they see on Facebook. "We genuinely have concerns about the impact on consumer benefit here," Ms Garlick told reporters.

"If suddenly it's decided by this regulator 'Oh actually people should see more of this type of content' that's a very new space to get into where the regulator is suddenly deciding what Australians should be seeing on their newsfeed."

Facebook could be more transparent and better educate consumers regarding tools to tailor their newsfeeds, such as advertising preferences, Ms Garlick admitted.

Rules that restrict hate speech could also impact free expression, he said, noting: "Those are considerations that need to be balanced."

Facebook insisted it wasn't solely responsible for the decline in mainstream media. "The proposed 'news ranking regulator' will not solve the problem of how to support sustainable journalism in Australia," Facebook's formal response to the ACCC report states. "The monetisation challenges facing some publishers began long before Facebook."

The ACCC's preliminary report said while digital platforms had revolutionised communication and offered many benefits, they were also "gateways" to information.

"Organisations like Google and Facebook are more than mere distributors or pure intermediaries in the supply of news in Australia; they increasingly perform similar functions as media businesses like selecting, curating and ranking content," watchdog chairman Rod Sims said in late 2018. "Yet, digital platforms face less regulation than many media businesses."

The ACCC is due to provide its final report to the government in early June.

The BoM are always trying to pretend that global warming is here. They are not brazen enough these days to say exactly that but constant talk of heatwaves creates that impression. The weather they refer to is in fact fairly normal -- as they admit further down in the story.

A Brisbane summer extends into March and a normal mid-afternoon summer temperature in Brisbane is 34C. At mid-afternoon on Monday 11th the temperature was 32C. The BoM forecast was 36C. So the "heatwave" impression is entirely false

Look at the graphic they supply as part of their report. With all the red ink it looks rather terrifying but all it shows is a normal weather pattern. Western Australia and Western Queensland (the purple bits) are always extraordinarily hot. The graph is a good example of how you can be truthful but deceptive

Parts of the east coast are set to swelter through extreme temperatures this week due to a post-summer heatwave.

The mercury will hit 36C in Brisbane's CBD on Monday and 39C in the western suburb of Ipswich - around 10C above average for this time of year.

The March record stands at 37.9C degrees for Brisbane and 38C for Ipswich.

The forecast has prompted the Bureau of Meteorology to issue a severe heatwave warning for south Queensland.

Meanwhile, Sydney will reach 28C on Monday and top 34 degrees on Tuesday - before three days of showers bringing 10mm of rain.

Perth will also be hot, reaching 30C on Monday, the same temperature as Canberra.

The south coast will be cooler, with Melbourne and Adelaide peaking at 23C while Hobart will reach 22C.

Brisbane will on Tuesday cool down slightly but still reach 33C and temperatures will remain in the 30s until at least next Saturday.

Further west, the Darling Downs and Lockyer Valley regions will swelter through the high 30s.

'A trough off the south-eastern Queensland coast has been quite persistent in its location, so the northerly winds will bring warm air to the region over the next few days,' Bureau of Meteorology forecaster Michael Gray told Daily Mail Australia.

Mr Gray said the warm weather isn't unusual for this time of the year in south-east Queensland. 'It's only been a few weeks since summer has ended,' he told Daily Mail Australia.

'Stay inside in the air conditioning, keep water bottles full and don't go outside in the hottest part of the day between 10am and 3pm,' he said.

Not everything here meets the eye. Why is the admission exam held on a Saturday at regional sites? Because regional sites are more convenient for richer families and such families are more likely to make the effort of a special trip on a Saturday. In other words, poor blacks are subtly discouraged from even applying.

Is that bad? For most blacks applying would be a waste of time anyway. They are rightly discouraged from getting into a situation that is too difficult for them.

The existing system sounds about right for everybody. The schools get students who can handle the work and not others. Any change would probably lead to a lot more frustrated blacks. The whole point of a good selection system is to keep everybody reasonably satisfied -- not encourage students to enrol in courses they cannot handle

No system will do perfect justice for everyone but being just for most can reasonably be aimed at.

One change that might be an improvement would be to make a special effort to identify unusually capable black children at the end of grade school and encourage just them to apply to an exam school.

Interim Boston schools Superintendent Laura Perille said Tuesday that her administration is exploring the idea of replacing the controversial exam that has determined the fate of tens of thousands of students vying for coveted spots at Boston Latin School and the city’s two other exam schools.

Perille disclosed the review during a City Council hearing that scrutinized exam-school admission policies. Her comments came six months after a Harvard University report found the school system’s reliance on a test designed for private school admission was blocking thousands of students of color from an education at some of the city’s best public schools.

“We are certainly keeping on the table the possibility of a different exam,” she said, adding that her administration is “basically looking at the different providers on the market.”

Changing the admission criteria for the city’s exam schools has long been a polarizing issue in Boston. Families that know the admission process well — mostly well-to-do ones — often pay for private tutoring in an all-out quest to get what many consider to be a private school education for their children at no cost.

But many civil rights advocates say the frenzy to snare an exam school seat in a city rife with many failing high schools has come at the expense of some of the city’s most disadvantaged students, whose families lack the financial resources or know-how to give them an edge in the admission race. Civil rights advocates have also repeatedly raised questions about potential racial bias in the admission exam.

“It’s high time we start reforming the admission policies of our exam schools,” City Councilor Kim Janey said at the start of the hearing.

In October, Harvard University’s Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston found that the Independent School Entrance Exam presented one of the biggest barriers for black and Latino students to gain admission to Latin School, Latin Academy, and the O’Bryant School of Math and Science. For instance, black and Latino students with MCAS scores similar to their white and Asian peers did not score as well on the ISEE, dashing their chances for admission. They also were significantly less likely to take the ISEE.

One reason for the performance gap was that the ISEE covers material in literature and algebra that is not part of the BPS curriculum and the test is administered on a Saturday. By contrast, if the school system relied instead on the MCAS, which is given during the school day, its exam schools would wind up with greater student diversity, according to the report.

Pressure to change admission criteria has only intensified. Just last week the NAACP, Lawyers for Civil Rights, and other groups concluded nearly two years of public forums on overhauling exam-school admission requirements and proposed their own solutions. They recommended having BPS develop its own admission test, offering seats to top students from each school or ZIP code, or creating a “holistic” approach that could include such factors as a student’s socioeconomic status and accomplishments in sports, the arts, and community service.

Ivan Espinoza-Madrigal, executive director for the Lawyers for Civil Rights, said the school system’s willingness now to explore the possibility of changing the ISEE is a step in the right direction, saying “it is in response to significant community-driven efforts to democratize access to Boston’s elite exam schools.”

“Right now the city’s reliance on the ISEE is completely misplaced,” he said in an interview. “The city should absolutely reconsider the entire admissions process.”

Initially, school officials were cool to the idea of replacing the ISEE after Harvard released its report, preferring instead to focus on efforts to expand opportunities for black and Latino students to take the exam. For instance, starting next year, sixth-graders will be able to take the ISEE during the school day instead of having to travel to a testing site on a Saturday. City students can take the exam for free.

School officials also have been trying to increase the caliber of instruction in the lower grades, although efforts have not been systemwide. A key program, Excellence for All, is in just 16 schools.

Discussions about possibly replacing the ISEE appear to be in the early stages.

In a statement after the hearing, the School Department said no changes to the exam would be proposed for this fall.

“Boston Public Schools will continue to review the exam school entrance assessment for planning purposes, but there is no timeline for any potential changes at this moment,” the statement said. “Any changes to the exam provider would likely include an opportunity for public input and a request-for-proposal process.”

During the hearing, Perille said that if the BPS switched to the MCAS, legal issues may need to be worked out. For instance, state rules may need to be changed to allow the MCAS, which was designed to measure public school performance, to be given to private-school students hoping to win a place at the city exam schools.

City Councilor Annissa Essaibi-George, chair of the council’s Education Committee, said she was unsure about the MCAS.

“As a former teacher, I’m not a super fan of using the MCAS,” said Essaibi-George, whose children attend Latin School and Latin Academy.

One data point released by school officials during the hearing struck a nerve with City Councilor Michael Flaherty. Officials said that about 40 percent of black and Latino students who registered for the ISEE exam the last two falls did not show up, which officials blamed in part on the exam being held on a weekend at regional sites. That, they said, can create transportation barriers.

But Flaherty argued that parents bear some responsibility. He said he understands that many families lead complicated lives, but he doubted assertions that many families lack awareness about the exam school and the admission process.

“Where are the parents in this discussion, and why does the BPS let them off the hook?” Flaherty said.

The Rev. Willie Bodrick of the Boston Network for Black Student Achievement later leaped to the defense of the system’s parents, especially those in marginalized communities.

“The parents in our communities are strong, they are resilient, they care, they love, and they work hard, sometimes two jobs, sometimes through language barriers,” he said. “They want what’s best for their kids.”

My daughter in law is a great traveller and when she was last in NYC she bought me a hat. Above is an image of it. She even bought it from Trump Tower. It is not actually a true Trump hat. A Trump hat says: "Make America great again". The one above says something slightly different. But very few people would notice the difference.

I wore it on my morning shopping trip a couple of days ago in suburban Brisbane. Brisbane is a long way from the USA so I wondered if it would get a reaction. Consistent with their aggressive nature, American Leftists do sometimes attack the wearers of such hats. Would that hatred spread to Brisbane?

It did, sort of. When I had finished my shopping around about 10am, I stopped off where I usually do for a morning cup of coffee. The girl on the counter took my money for it but then went out the back. She came back and told me they had run out of coffee!

I didn't argue. In the best libertarian style, I just left for another place a few doors down that had plenty of coffee! What do you think? Do you think a coffee joint would really run out of coffee?

There's a famous Australian Country and Western song called "The pub with no beer". So I did one better. I encountered a coffee joint with no coffee! I am not going to name the shop concerned as the people there are usually pleasant and I like their coffee. They served me as usual yesterday. We conservastives are forgiving people. We have a lot to forgive -- JR

In 2002, a reader of this blog, Derk Lupinek, who was living in Japan, sent me an email questioning my definition of conservatism. He said that my definition seemed irrelevant to Japanese politics. Here is what he wrote:

"I live in Japan, and when I first moved here I found myself trying to decide whether the Japanese were deeply conservative, as I had been led to believe, or whether they were actually quite liberal, especially given their attitudes toward sex.

They clearly do not value individual liberty, which would mean they are not conservative by your definition, but they seek to preserve their culture down to the most excruciating details, leaving me with the feeling that they are in fact deeply conservative, at least in the sense that Philosoblog intends.

So, while I do agree with your definition as it relates to conservatism in the West, it certainly doesn't account for deeply conservative individuals in other cultures, and those individuals are indeed trying to "conserve" something.

In other words, you seem to be using the term "conservative" to refer to a political movement that has occurred in the West, and Philosoblog is just using the term more generally to refer to a psychological mindset. Am I mistaken?"
I think I can now give a fuller reply than I did in 2002: I agree that "conservative" has come to have the lexical meaning of "opposed to change". And that is fine. I have no desire to re-write the dictionary.

But to understand what is going on we have to look at WHY conservatives oppose some changes. My point is that those individuals usually labelled "conservative" in the Anglosphere are motivated primarily by a love of liberty and that their opposition to what the Left want stems not from an opposition to change in general but from skepticism about the wisdom and benefit of Leftist policies, which are invariably authoritarian. Leftists want to stop us doing things we normally do and make us do things that we would not normally do, which is the irreducible core of authoritarianism

So, yes, the Japanese are conservative but they have different reasons for that -- reasons that I know little about.

So it is OK to characterize all conservatives, including Western conservatives, as being opposed to change -- as long as we do not take big mental leaps to say WHY they oppose some changes.

The claim that conservatives oppose ALL change is patently absurd Leftist propaganda. Notable conservatives such as Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Donald J. Trump are clearly energetic agents of change. Mr Trump seems to do just about everything differently. So by and large it is only the poorly thought-out ideas of the Left that conservatives rapidly reject. They have no attitude to change as such. They just don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The people who DO have a particular attitude to change are the Left. Change is their entire message. They basically want to change everything -- out of an arrogant and ignorant assumption that they know how to create a new Eden. The Soviets even thought that they could create a "New Soviet man".

Currently, the "Green New Deal" championed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez exemplifies just how sweeping in scope and just how empty-headed Leftism can be. In good Leftist style, AOC wants to change just about everything in America. Sadly for America her ideas are hugely popular among American Leftists. She would create huge destruction given her way

The "New Deal" that the "Green New Deal" refers to was a series of economic initiatives in the 1930s by Democrat President Franklin Delano Roosevelt that was modelled on the policies of Fascist Italy. Hillary Clinton's slogan in the last presidential election -- "Better together" -- was also the central idea of Italian Fascism.

And there is always the unapologetic authoritarianism of "Bernie" Sanders:

In such circumstance politics is largely a contest between the self-righteous and impetuous dreamers who want to tear down our existing society in order to move us towards a new Eden and those who stand in the way of that folly. As Bill Buckley famously said: "A Conservative is a fellow who is standing athwart history yelling ’Stop!’" Bill was a very polite man so he said "history" where I would have said "Leftist folly".

The authoritarian element in British politics is very strong -- only marginally less so among the Conservatives -- so the popular wish for Britain to cast off the shackles of Europe has been heavily resisted by the political class. The result has been no agreement about how to move forward with Brexit -- Britain's exit from the EU. In the circumstances, I have mostly left their interminable debates about it without comment. I totally agree with Tony Abbott's comments about it however. Some excerpts below.

Because Abbott is still influential in conservative circles, there have been a couple of rejoinders to his remarks. I have not reproduced those rejoinders because it seems to me that they prove Abbott's point. They are just ‘neurotic anxiety’, as Abbott calls them. The link below does lead to them if you want to evaluate them yourself.

Britain in fact has nothing to fear from the EU. Britain buys a lot more from Europe than vice versa so a trade war would rapidly lead to EU capitulation. Mrs May hasn't got the stones to do it but Britain would just have to put a complete embargo on the importation into Britain of French and German motor vehicles for the EU to come begging, with M. Macron in the lead and Mrs Merkel not far behind.

Mr Trump is unhappy with the European motor vehicle manufacturers at the moment so a combined Anglo American embargo on them would not take much organizing. It would be quite hilarious and devastating in its effects and would show France and Germany up as the petulant children that they currently are

Tony Abbott has waded into the contentious debate about Britain’s looming exit from the European Union.

The former prime minister of Australia wrote a piece for The Spectator, titled No deal? No problem, in which he mocked the “neurotic anxiety” of politicians worried about the possibility of implementing Brexit without an official deal with the EU.

“Britain, we’re led to believe, is heading for the worst catastrophe in its history,” Mr Abbott said.

“Apparently the country that saw off Hitler, the Kaiser, Napoleon and the Spanish Armada is now paralysed with fear at the very thought of leaving the EU.”

Britain is due to exit the EU in less than a month, on March 29.

Prime Minister Theresa May has spent the last two years trying to negotiate an agreement both sides can support, but when her proposed deal was put to the UK parliament in January, it was rejected by a huge margin.

She has promised MPs another vote on March 12. If they shoot down her deal again, she will call votes to determine whether they support a no deal Brexit, or whether they want to extend the deadline past March 29.

Mr Abbott believes Britain would be better off crashing out of the EU with no deal than procrastinating or agreeing to a “bad deal”.

He argued a disorderly Brexit would mean “at most a few months of inconvenience”.

“By far the more serious threat comes from Britain caving in and agreeing to a bad deal that imposes most of the burdens of EU membership but with few of the benefits. Or, almost as bad, a Brexit delay that would keep the UK as a tethered goat — while the EU shows how it will humiliate any country with the temerity to leave.

“For Britain to lose its nerve now would represent failure on an epic scale.”

Mr Abbott said the EU, not Britain, would “clearly be the loser” in any sort of spiteful no deal scenario.

“As a former prime minister of a country that has a perfectly satisfactory ‘no deal’ relationship with the EU, let me assure you: no deal would be no problem. Or at least no problem that Britain couldn’t quickly take in its stride,” he said.

“A no deal relationship with the EU has not stopped Australia doing about $US70 billion worth of trade with the EU in goods and services.

“It must baffle pundits, but Australia trades with the EU (and with Britain) without being part of any customs union.

“Theresa May was quite correct two years ago when she said that no deal was better than a bad deal. What she should have known even then was that a bad deal was all that Britain was ever going to get from an EU with a vested interest in ensuring that no country ever leaves.”

He said the real difficulty with Brexit all along had not been negotiating an agreement, but dealing with “the neurotic anxiety of the official political class”, which he said sees the EU as a “civilising force”.

This is of course a highly charged debate — Britain has spent years arguing about practically nothing else

About

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists. The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

Some brief observations about Leftism

As a good academic, I first define my terms: A Leftist is a person who is so dissatisfied with the way things naturally are that he/she is prepared to use force to make people behave in ways that they otherwise would not.

Leftists think that utopia can be coerced into existence -- so no dishonesty or brutality is beyond them in pursuit of that "noble" goal

Leftism is fundamentally authoritarian. Whether by revolution or by legislation, Leftists aim to change what people can and must do. When in 2008 Obama said that he wanted to "fundamentally transform" America, he was not talking about America's geography or topography but rather about American people. He wanted them to stop doing things that they wanted to do and make them do things that they did not want to do. Can you get a better definition of authoritarianism than that?

And note that an American President is elected to administer the law, not make it. That seems to have escaped Mr Obama

That Leftism is intrinsically authoritarian is not a new insight. It was well understood by none other than Friedrich Engels (Yes. THAT Engels). His excellent short essay On authority was written as a reproof to the dreamy Anarchist Left of his day. It concludes: "A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means"

"The arguments for free markets, limited government etc are complicated but correct. The Left have it easy. Their philosophies are simple but wrong. The public grasp simple ideas much more easily than complicated ones" -- Aaron Oakley

Evan Sayet: The Left sides "...invariably with evil over good, wrong over right, and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success." (t=5:35+ on video)

Some useful definitions:

If a conservative doesn't like guns, he doesn't buy one. If a liberal doesn't like guns, he wants all guns outlawed. If a conservative is a vegetarian, he doesn't eat meat. If a liberal is a vegetarian, he wants all meat products banned for everyone. If a conservative is down-and-out, he thinks about how to better his situation. A liberal wonders who is going to take care of him. If a conservative doesn't like a talk show host, he switches channels. Liberals demand that those they don't like be shut down. If a conservative is a non-believer, he doesn't go to church. A liberal non-believer wants any mention of God and religion silenced. (Unless it's a foreign religion, of course!) If a conservative decides he needs health care, he goes about shopping for it, or may choose a job that provides it. A liberal demands that the rest of us pay for his.

Death taxes: You would expect a conscientious person, of whatever degree of intelligence, to reflect on the strange contradiction involved in denying people the right to unearned wealth, while supporting programs that give people unearned wealth.

America is no longer the land of the free. It is now the land of the regulated -- though it is not alone in that, of course

Envy is a strong and widespread human emotion so there has alway been widespread support for policies of economic "levelling". Both the USA and the modern-day State of Israel were founded by communists but reality taught both societies that respect for the individual gave much better outcomes than levelling ideas. Sadly, there are many people in both societies in whom hatred for others is so strong that they are incapable of respect for the individual. The destructiveness of what they support causes them to call themselves many names in different times and places but they are the backbone of the political Left

The large number of rich Leftists suggests that, for them, envy is secondary. They are directly driven by hatred and scorn for many of the other people that they see about them. Hatred of others can be rooted in many things, not only in envy. But the haters come together as the Left.

Leftists hate the world around them and want to change it: the people in it most particularly. Conservatives just want to be left alone to make their own decisions and follow their own values.

The failure of the Soviet experiment has definitely made the American Left more vicious and hate-filled than they were. The plain failure of what passed for ideas among them has enraged rather than humbled them.

Ronald Reagan famously observed that the status quo is Latin for “the mess we’re in.” So much for the vacant Leftist claim that conservatives are simply defenders of the status quo. They think that conservatives are as lacking in principles as they are.

The shallow thinkers of the Left sometimes claim that conservatives want to impose their own will on others in the matter of abortion. To make that claim is however to confuse religion with politics. Conservatives are in fact divided about their response to abortion. The REAL opposition to abortion is religious rather than political. And the church which has historically tended to support the LEFT -- the Roman Catholic church -- is the most fervent in the anti-abortion cause. Conservatives are indeed the one side of politics to have moral qualms on the issue but they tend to seek a middle road in dealing with it. Taking the issue to the point of legal prohibitions is a religious doctrine rather than a conservative one -- and the religion concerned may or may not be characteristically conservative. More on that here

The Leftist hunger for change to the society that they hate leads to a hunger for control over other people. And they will do and say anything to get that control: "Power at any price". Leftist politicians are mostly self-aggrandizing crooks who gain power by deceiving the uninformed with snake-oil promises -- power which they invariably use to destroy. Destruction is all that they are good at. Destruction is what haters do.

Leftists are consistent only in their hate. They don't have principles. How can they when "there is no such thing as right and wrong"? All they have is postures, pretend-principles that can be changed as easily as one changes one's shirt

A Leftist assumption: Making money doesn't entitle you to it, but wanting money does.

"Politicians never accuse you of 'greed' for wanting other people's money -- only for wanting to keep your own money." --columnist Joe Sobran (1946-2010)

I often wonder why Leftists refer to conservatives as "wingnuts". A wingnut is a very useful device that adds versatility wherever it is used. Clearly, Leftists are not even good at abuse. Once they have accused their opponents of racism and Nazism, their cupboard is bare. Similarly, Leftists seem to think it is a devastating critique to refer to "Worldnet Daily" as "Worldnut Daily". The poverty of their argumentation is truly pitiful

The Leftist assertion that there is no such thing as right and wrong has a distinguished history. It was Pontius Pilate who said "What is truth?" (John 18:38). From a Christian viewpoint, the assertion is undoubtedly the Devil's gospel

"If one rejects laissez faire on account of man's fallibility and moral weakness, one must for the same reason also reject every kind of government action." - Ludwig von Mises

Because of their need to be different from the mainstream, Leftists are very good at pretending that sow's ears are silk purses

Among people who should know better, Leftism is a character defect. Leftists HATE success in others -- which is why notably successful societies such as the USA and Israel are hated and failures such as the Palestinians can do no wrong.

A Leftist's beliefs are all designed to pander to his ego. So when you have an argument with a Leftist, you are not really discussing the facts. You are threatening his self esteem. Which is why the normal Leftist response to challenge is mere abuse.

Because of the fragility of a Leftist's ego, anything that threatens it is intolerable and provokes rage. So most Leftist blogs can be summarized in one sentence: "How DARE anybody question what I believe!". Rage and abuse substitute for an appeal to facts and reason.

Their threatened egos sometimes drive Leftists into quite desperate flights from reality. For instance, they often call Israel an "Apartheid state" -- when it is in fact the Arab states that practice Apartheid -- witness the severe restrictions on Christians in Saudi Arabia. There are no such restrictions in Israel.

Because their beliefs serve their ego rather than reality, Leftists just KNOW what is good for us. Conservatives need evidence.

“Absolute certainty is the privilege of uneducated men and fanatics.” -- C.J. Keyser

"Almost all professors of the arts and sciences are egregiously conceited, and derive their happiness from their conceit" -- Erasmus

THE FALSIFICATION OF HISTORY HAS DONE MORE TO IMPEDE HUMAN DEVELOPMENT THAN ANY ONE THING KNOWN TO MANKIND -- ROUSSEAU

"Seest thou a man wise in his own conceit? there is more hope of a fool than of him" (Proverbs 26: 12). I think that sums up Leftists pretty well.

Eminent British astrophysicist Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington is often quoted as saying: "Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine." It was probably in fact said by his contemporary, J.B.S. Haldane. But regardless of authorship, it could well be a conservative credo not only about the cosmos but also about human beings and human society. Mankind is too complex to be summed up by simple rules and even complex rules are only approximations with many exceptions.

Politics is the only thing Leftists know about. They know nothing of economics, history or business. Their only expertise is in promoting feelings of grievance

Socialism makes the individual the slave of the state – capitalism frees them.

MESSAGE to Leftists: Even if you killed all conservatives tomorrow, you would just end up in another Soviet Union. Conservatives are all that stand between you and that dismal fate.

Many readers here will have noticed that what I say about Leftists sometimes sounds reminiscent of what Leftists say about conservatives. There is an excellent reason for that. Leftists are great "projectors" (people who see their own faults in others). So a good first step in finding out what is true of Leftists is to look at what they say about conservatives! They even accuse conservatives of projection (of course).

The research shows clearly that one's Left/Right stance is strongly genetically inherited but nobody knows just what specifically is inherited. What is inherited that makes people Leftist or Rightist? There is any amount of evidence that personality traits are strongly genetically inherited so my proposal is that hard-core Leftists are people who tend to let their emotions (including hatred and envy) run away with them and who are much more in need of seeing themselves as better than others -- two attributes that are probably related to one another. Such Leftists may be an evolutionary leftover from a more primitive past.

The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they (under the chairmanship of Ulric Neisser) have had to concede a large gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ.

Leftists seem to believe that if someone like Al Gore says it, it must be right. They obviously have a strong need for an authority figure. The fact that the two most authoritarian regimes of the 20th century (Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia) were socialist is thus no surprise. Leftists often accuse conservatives of being "authoritarian" but that is just part of their usual "projective" strategy -- seeing in others what is really true of themselves.

"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here. For roughly two centuries now, antisemitism has, throughout the Western world, been principally associated with Leftism (including the socialist Hitler) -- as it is to this day. See here.

Leftists call their hatred of Israel "Anti-Zionism" but Zionists are only a small minority in Israel

Some of the Leftist hatred of Israel is motivated by old-fashioned antisemitism (beliefs in Jewish "control" etc.) but most of it is just the regular Leftist hatred of success in others. And because the societies they inhabit do not give them the vast amount of recognition that their large but weak egos need, some of the most virulent haters of Israel and America live in those countries. So the hatred is the product of pathologically high self-esteem.

"With their infernal racial set-asides, racial quotas, and race norming, liberals share many of the Klan's premises. The Klan sees the world in terms of race and ethnicity. So do liberals! Indeed, liberals and white supremacists are the only people left in America who are neurotically obsessed with race. Conservatives champion a color-blind society" -- Ann Coulter

Who said this in 1968? "I am not, and never have been, a man of the right. My position was on the Left and is now in the centre of politics". It was Sir Oswald Mosley, founder and leader of the British Union of Fascists

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Politicians are in general only a little above average in intelligence so the idea that they can make better decisions for us that we can make ourselves is laughable

A quote from the late Dr. Adrian Rogers, 1931–2005: "You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it."

A lesson in Australian: When an Australian calls someone a "big-noter", he is saying that the person is a chronic and rather pathetic seeker of admiration -- as in someone who often pulls out "big notes" (e.g. $100.00 bills) to pay for things, thus endeavouring to create the impression that he is rich. The term describes the mentality rather than the actual behavior with money and it aptly describes many Leftists. When they purport to show "compassion" by advocating things that cost themselves nothing (e.g. advocating more taxes on "the rich" to help "the poor"), an Australian might say that the Leftist is "big-noting himself". There is an example of the usage here. The term conveys contempt. There is a wise description of Australians generally here

Heritage is what survives death: Very rare and hence very valuable

Two lines below of a famous hymn that would be incomprehensible to Leftists today ("honor"? "right"? "freedom?" Freedom to agree with them is the only freedom they believe in)

First to fight for right and freedom,
And to keep our honor clean

It is of course the hymn of the USMC -- still today the relentless warriors that they always were.

If any of the short observations above about Leftism seem wrong, note that they do not stand alone. The evidence for them is set out at great length in a MONOGRAPH on Leftism.

You can email me (John Ray) here (Hotmail address). In emailing me, you can address me as "John", "Jon", "Dr. Ray" or "JR" and that will be fine -- but my preference is for "JR"

There are also two blogspot blogs which record what I think are my main recent articles here and here. Similar content can be more conveniently accessed via my subject-indexed list of short articles here or here (I rarely write long articles these days)